Well, I see this removal a bit problematic since a lot of terms, specially on accounting are are very different from Spanish (Spain) to any other american latin spanish variants, and this way you'll force them to modify a lot via PRs. I don't see either a clear solution for not having this gap in the translation status, but it's better to educate translators on not duplicating that removing the direct possibility of editing terms. Remember that git/GitHub is a bit obscure for functional people or newcomers.

Maybe we can talk with Transifex if they have plans for improving this regionalism issue allowing somehow a way to mark a translation as "translated on master language" or similar.

Hello translators!
In this monthly newsletter, the global progress, the documentation and
how to handle the regional variations of a language.
Progress
========
The new version 9.0 has gains maturity with many bug fixes and now quite
a good translation status.
376.000 words have been translated in the last month (for 285k in
October month). This proves a growing adoption of the new version and an
interest to get it translated.
Here is the current progress of language for reviewed terms:
1. 99.90% (26896 terms) Dutch
2. 85.29% (22962 terms) Hungarian
3. 73.66% (19832 terms) French
4. 73.01% (19658 terms) Portuguese
5. 70.71% (19039 terms) Croatian
6. 57.99% (15612 terms) Macedonian
7. 56.94% (15331 terms) Spanish
8. 55.42% (14921 terms) Spanish (Colombia)
9. 55.04% (14818 terms) Polish
10. 54.26% (14608 terms) Greek
Hungarian is very close to be fully translated and reviewed while French
and Chinese are almost fully translated (99 and 90%) but still lack of
some reviewed terms (don't hesitate to help).
Documentation
=============
Last month, we have published on Transifex the functional documentation
for those who wish to translate it.
The redaction is still in progress and published accordingly to on Odoo
website at:
https://www.odoo.com/documentation/user/9.0/
This means that of course, the number of words is still growing as the
documentation is written.
However it's nice to see that some of you have already been actively
working on the translation of the documentation.
Global progress:
1. 39.86% (1843 terms) Spanish
2. 35.94% (1662 terms) Dutch
3. 17.80% (823 terms) Portuguese (Brazil)
4. 16.03% (741 terms) Chinese (China)
5. 6.23% (288 terms) French
Spanish and Dutch translations are already published on the website
while Portuguese and Chinese are working well and will probably be soon
published as well.
https://www.odoo.com/documentation/user/9.0/es/https://www.odoo.com/documentation/user/9.0/nl/
Regionalisation
===============
The way the regional versions of a language (e.g. French from Belgium
(fr_BE) vs French (fr)) is not very clear in Odoo. When discussing with
translators, I often realise it is not very well understood.
As a reminder, when an Odoo instance is running in fr_BE, the
translations from fr_BE will be used and it will use the one from fr
(the "main" language) for the missing terms. This means that the
French-Belgium should actually only contain the terms that are different
from French.
Translation the same term in both versions would be a waste of effort,
would lead to bigger files (FYI, translation files are taking more than
the half of the size of the Odoo source folder) and is harder to
maintain (need to correct errors on multiple places).
Unfortunately, in Transifex, this inheritance mechanism is not clear and
languages seems to be almost not translated. This means that a regional
language often seems incomplete while it may actually be fully
translated. Some new translators will start translating what seems
untranslated to them instead of focussing on the main language. As the
regional languages are less active, it will often take more time to get
reviewed or to correct errors.
For this reason, we would like to remove the regional versions of a
language from Transifex.
Odoo would still support the regional variations (and keep existing
translations) but the difference would be made on GitHub, trough pull
requests. This way, we hope that translators will concentrate on making
the main languages complete and fully reviewed while we make sure that
submitted regional variations are maintained to the minimum.
We believe that for most variations (there is a few exceptions like
zh_CN or pt_BR) have very few terms different and a regional translation
should be quite small.
This would of course require some changes in the teams organisation and
we need to determine the list of languages to keep.
For that I would like to get your feedback and see how we can make the
transition the more efficient.
Let us know what you think.
Regards
Martin
--
Martin Trigaux
Odoo (Formerly OpenERP)
https://odoo.comhttps://github.com/mart-e